Holidazed cookbook to help you through the dark days ahead

Blogger Jerry James Stone gets his Kickstarter financed with plenty of help from friends, fans and cocktail-lovers.

The holidays are a tough time for many of us; whether it's dealing with difficult relatives, feeling the pressure to pull off the perfect party, or just trying not think about the family that is far away or has passed, it's not fun times for many. Jerry James Stone (an MNN contributor too) is out to help us all out of this trying time (or, for those of us who are into the holidays, to make them even better!). With booze. Hey, it IS the darkest part of the year, isn't it?

As an offshoot of his superpopular healthy-and-hearty vegetarian/vegan food and drinks site, Cooking Stoned, the former software engineer-turned-green-blogger-turned-recipe-master, Stone figured that a cookbook was his next step to world domination, and after realizing that his cocktail recipes were some of his most trafficked posts, determined that would be a good foundation for a printed tome. Thus was born "Holidazed!" While the book focuses on drinks, there are recipes for food as well—after all, what kind of a party is it (even if it's a party of one!) without anything to snack on?

So Stone, who is already quite practiced at making videos, put together a great one for his project (see below) on Kickstarter. And...success! He is more than fully funded AND you can still get in on the action (you'll get an e-book or a printed copy) in time for the holidays.

Of his Kickstarter success, Stone says, "I'm lucky, very lucky. I felt confident that my network would support me in making this book. However, I had no idea I would be fully funded in just three days. If that's not a big serving of awesomesauce, I don't know what is."

Like most creators, Stone is excited that the book gets to be just the way he (and his fans) want it: "I love Kickstarter because, like food, it is about community. So I feel blessed that a platform like this exists. Would this book be made without it? Probably, but I don't really know. What I do know is that it wouldn't be my vision, 100%. No publisher would go for that. The fact that I can do my book, my way, means a lot to me."